Cards and Crystals and Dogs! Oh My!
“Don’t waste it.”
This sentence has stuck with me for about a month now when I had a zoom meeting with Steve Del Savio of Packleader Dogs in the New Jersey area. I was sharing with him my ideas for this summer, how I’m pivoting my classes, and his take on it all.
After some solid advice and opinions, he asked me “what do you want to be doing? Do that.” *Gulp*
What I want to be doing is a liiiiittle different than what I am doing, and I always felt like I had to choose. Now, a month after this conversation, I’m laughing at that mindset, but truth be told, I’m still not totally confident about it.
Over the past 5 years or so, my interest in the metaphysical has grown immensely. As a teen, I attended a psychic fair or two with my mom and sisters but other than that, any sort of spiritual belief system wasn’t practiced in our house growing up – so it was all very new to me.
When I started ARF’s in 2019 (after talking to my own card reader, duh!) I was all about the business. Running a “classic” dog training service and providing knowledge to my clients. It worked great, but I started noticing who the dogs were…we would look at each other and I’d know there’s WAY more behind those eyes than just a creature with four feet and a heartbeat.
So, what did I do with this inner knowing? SHOVE IT DOWN WHERE IT BELONGED, OBVIOUSLY!
It wasn’t until 2020 when I was doing a virtual session with a client, and as we were chatting, I got this idea to pull a card (totally in secret) as we were just starting. The card was King of Air with feathers all over the card and a very powerful looking man as the king. Funny, I thought, the dog’s name tied into this card as well as his behaviour. He thought he was a real somebody. At the end of the session, I was giving my final thoughts and gameplan, and I don’t remember what I said, but the clients told me their dog lifted his head and looked as if to hear what I was talking about. Once I logged off, I shuffled the oracle card deck and pulled another card asking where they are now, and I got Page of Air – the king had been dethroned.
And, well, that was pretty much it for pulling cards for dogs as I was such a chicken shit about it. I feared the potential judgment of offering this to people because it’s not “mainstream” and I didn’t want to get “pffft’d” at or worse, offend anyone.
While learning more about oracle cards, tarot cards, meditating, prayer, and vibration boards; I was also learning about chakras and how they’re responsible for different parts of our bodies.
I’d meet many a dog who’s behaviour problem matched the chakra associated with it, but I’d never say anything to the owner standing there because I didn’t know how to segue from “let’s use the leash for this AND your dog should have a citrine stone taped to its collar because it’s only chewing wood and paper and that’s associated with the solar plexus chakra so good chance their self esteem is low and maybe get its liver checked out k byyyyeee”
I felt like I couldn’t merge the two worlds because I had it in my head that people are either into logical dog training, behaviour, and psychology OR they’re hoping calling a pet psychic and balancing the chakras will cure it all like the books say.
So, after sitting with Steve’s comment of “don’t waste it” for a couple days, I realized I’m ready to start bringing this gift forward. That what I do doesn’t have to be either or anymore and I can help the dog/human relationship even further.
What I’m doing is unexplainable and defies logic really….by connecting to the dog’s spirit in my meditation, they show me the crystals that interest them, and they always seem to correlate to the chakra that’s out of balance or illuminated more. Then the cards I pull after the meditation bring it all together and we have a deeper understanding to who the dog is.
A lot of the stuff our dogs do is just a simple miscommunication from human to dog, but maybe there’s moments where our dog is trying to communicate to us – wouldn’t it be grand to hear what they have to say?